Thom Scott-Phillips & Dan Sperber (2015) The mutual relevance of teaching and cultural attraction (Commentary on M. A. Kline “How to learn about teaching: An evolutionary framework for the study of teaching behavior in humans and other animals”). Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38, 44-45.

Abstract: there is an important relationship between cultural attraction and teaching. The very function of teaching is to make the content taught an attractor. Teaching, moreover, typically fulfills its function by exploiting a variety of factors of cultural attraction that help make its content learnable and teachable.

Jérôme Prado, Nicola Spotorno, Eric Koun, Emily Hewitt, Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst, Dan Sperber, Ira Noveck (2015) Neural interaction between logical reasoning and pragmatic processing in narrative discourse. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 27(4), 692-704.

 Abstract: Logical connectives (e.g., or , if, and not) are central to everyday conversation, and the inferences they generate are made with little effort in pragmatically sound situations. In contrast, the neural substrates of logical inference-making have been studied exclusively in abstract tasks where pragmatic concerns are minimal. Here, we used fMRI in an innovative design that employed narratives to investigate the interaction between logical reasoning and pragmatic processing in natural discourse.

Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson (2015) Beyond speaker’s meaning. Croatian Journal of Philosophy XV(44), 117-149.

Abstract: Our main aim is to show that constructing an adequate theory of communication involves going beyond Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning. We argue that the characterisation of ostensive communication introduced in relevance theory can provide a conceptually unified explanation of a much wider range of communicative acts than Grice was concerned with, including cases of both ‘showing that’ and ‘telling that’, and with both determinate and indeterminate import.